Introducing Rapido!

Rapido or fast/rapid in Español was built, like many things, out of a frustration with existing software. I use both Facebook and Twitter frequently, but find it obnoxious to open up either, type a message, copy it, then open up the other app, paste it, and send it. I know you can setup both Facebook and Twitter to cross-post messages, but I don’t always want to send the same update to both, so that is a less than perfect solution. 

Enter Rapido.



Open a single app, type your message/update, then select either Twitter, Facebook or both, hit “Send” and you’re good to go. Fast, simple, easy. Try it out now!

 

Cross-Device Communication

I’m not sure exactly what to call this awesome trend of having our devices (phones, mostly) share information, send information or interact with another device: Cross-Device Messaging? Cross-Device Communication? Cross-Device Syncing? A combination of the three? Either way, it is awesome. It has actually changed the way I do things for the better and allows me to access/watch/transfer things from one device to another. When this happens, many times it feels like magic, I click a button and boom I’ve transferred a map from my computer to my phone and can walk away from my desk and head off to wherever it is I need to go. As I was creating a list of things that fit under this umbrella of device-to-device communication, I broke them down into different categories. Push, Remote Control, Sync and Companion.

Chrome to Phone in action.

Push
Push notifications have become commonplace and fairly standard with most Mobile Apps, especially those that involve social networks and email, where people want/need information as soon as it is available. As a result of all this pushing, our devices have become central hubs for our digital life, whenever anything happens, we get a notification and can take action. More about how awesome push is in my previous post: Push Away. When push technology is applied between devices and not just web services and phones, a whole new world of possibilities open up.

Chrome to Phone
Google’s “Chrome to Phone” was made possible after an upgrade to Android called “Cloud to Device Messaging” which allowed almost instant communication between devices and computers. To get this working, you need an app installed on your phone (to receive, and take action on the “message”) and an extension in Chrome (to send the “message”). What this allows is nothing short of amazing. If I am on Google Maps, looking up a new dinner spot, I simply click the “Chrome to Phone” icon in Chrome, and my phone receives the “message”, a URL to Google Maps, and opens up the same spot using Google Maps on my phone. Magic. You can do the same thing with any URL, your phone receives the URL and opens the browser or the appropriate application that matches the URL. This setup is a must-have for users of Android and Chrome, I use this almost every day, it IS that useful. Watch the video below to see how awesome it is: 

Google Play Store
The Android Market Google Play Store has allowed users to install apps from the web directly to their Android Phones for quite some time now. It feels like magic whenever I do it, seriously: I click “Install”, select a device, then BOOM! my phone begins downloading and I have the app, without even touching my phone. Here’s a quick video demonstrating, ignore the cheesy promotional material and music:

Recently the Android Market Play Store has been updated to allow Updating and Uninstalling of Apps on a device. If I want to get rid of an app, I just pull up the Play Store on my computer and then click the trash can, and boom, uninstalled, simple as that, no hunting through the settings menu or Play Store on my phone for the uninstall button (which isn’t hard to find, but this is still cooler and faster). Same goes for apps, when they’ve been updated, you can click the “Update” link in place of the “Install” or “Installed” button. This is a great way to manage the apps on your device without ever having to touch it.

Google Play Update/Uninstall Apps

AirPlay
I’m going to have to refrain from using the word magic again, even though by most standards AirPlay is pretty magical. It simply works, it IS limited to a few (mostly Apple-only) devices, and I haven’t used all of its features, so I haven’t been able to fully appreciate how awesome and “magical” it is. In my own practice I was able to send music from my phone (iPhone 4) to a pair of remote speakers: my iTunes on my home Windows PC, and my Android phone using a hacky app called AirBubble, which pretends to be an AirPlay speaker. It was pretty cool to have music playing downstairs on the PC and upstairs on my phone and being able to control it from wherever I had service. The "killer-app", I’m told, is being able to send video to your Apple TV from your iPad/iPhone/MacBook and watching it on your TV; and having a Home Theater Receiver (Denon, Onkyo, etc) with AirPlay support, so you can listen to your music on the best sound system in the house. I have neither a sound system or an Apple TV, so for now I’ll take other people’s word for it. This particular example also creeps into the “Remote Control” aspect of multi-device-awesomeness, which I’ll get into in another post.

Xbox 360
Microsoft has really done a great job with the Xbox, knock them for some of their other endeavors, but the Xbox and the Live Marketplace are great customer service experiences (not counting Microsoft Points, which are annoying, still). I imagine most people probably buy things using the Xbox itself, due to their frequent use of the console or by responding to an ad on the Xbox Live Dashboard. When you buy things on the Xbox, it is quite simple: buy it, and then the download begins, unless you are playing a game that requires the internet, either way it is added to a queue to be downloaded when the connection frees up, or once you turn “off” the console for the night. Buying a game on xbox.com, you are presented with a “Download to Xbox 360” option which, upon completing the purchase, adds the item to your download queue. The use-case here, at least from my perspective: “Oh cool, the latest Map pack for Call of Duty just dropped. I’ll buy this here at work (on my phone since xbox.com is blocked) and it will begin downloading as soon as I get home and fire up my xbox.” While not as instantaneously gratifying as installing an app from the Play Store, it adds a layer of convenience to my shopping experience.

Xbox Live Download to Xbox

These are just a few examples in the “Push” category. While some might not change your life at all, they allow us to make devices and the internet work better for us.

What are some “Push to” services that you use?

You Work for Me Now

In the last few weeks I have discovered a few services that take boring and menial tasks and turn them into automatic automated awesomeness. The general rule is: “If it is too difficult to do or remember, most people won’t do it.” Basically, any amount of complexity or repetition added to a task makes it easy to put off and not ever do, especially things we need to do, like letting your wife know when you’ll be home from work. Here’s where IFTTT and on{X} come into play. They allow normal people (non-programmers) to easily setup simple tasks that can automate some of our life both online and off.

IFTTT

If This Then That (IFTTT), is the simplest form of logic: if this event happens, then execute that action. If I Tweet, then post to Facebook. IFTTT is the biggest mashup of web services and APIs that I have ever seen, seriously check out their list of “Channels” as of this writing there are 50 different services you can connect to.

At its heart IFTTT is about making your digital life simpler by automating tasks. Some common examples include cross-posting a status update, backing up photos, will it rain tomorrow?, and letting people know when you finally posted to your blog. Among options you can have a notification sent via email, sms or push message when a trigger occurs, or have things happen passively and not need to do or see anything. This is especially useful for backing up my photos, pretty much anything I post online can be transferred to my Dropbox account and saved on my home computer. I don’t have to worry about it.

I setup a special recipe to email my dad, who refuses to use Facebook and doesn't have an Android or iPhone, so he can see the awesome pictures of my son, whenever I post them.

Recently IFTTT has integrated with the physical world, through the use of Belkin’s recently released set of WeMo sensor/switches. These sensors can be setup as triggers or actions, you can have your lights automatically turn on at 6AM, or off at 10PM. You can receive a notification when a switch has been triggered, or turn on/off a light with a text message. The possibilities are pretty amazing when you think about being able to trigger certain actions based on the whether outside. One recipe: If it gets cold, turn on my bedroom heater, lets you have a nice warm bed when you need it.

on{X}

on{X} was developed by Microsoft as an experiment in automating your life through your Android phone. This has the same concept as above, on X, or when X happens, do this. The key difference here is that it is using your phone and its many sensors to receive triggers, and perform actions: on{leave my house} turn off my wifi. 

Recipes are written online and then pushed to your phone through the on{X} app which hooks into all of the hardware sensors, so you can detect your location and perform an action. For example, send my wife a text message when I leave work, this is great because I don’t have to remember to let her know that I left, it happens automatically and it comes from my phone.

They’ve recently updated their system to support NFC, proximity sensor, and a few other great enhancements. I’ve setup my phone to disable wifi when I leave home, launch Foursquare once I’ve been in a place for longer than 20 minutes, and to message my wife when I leave work. These have saved me time by having my phone do things automatically, things that I might forget or otherwise not have time to do. on{X} hasn’t been around as long as IFTTT so their list of pre-built recipes isn’t very long, but one of the great things, is that on{X} allows you to write your own recipes and share them with the community. I modified the “launch Foursquare” recipe to only trigger when I am outside the range of my home, since I don’t checkin at my house.

As with my previous post about push notifications, these put our phones to work for us, so we can keep up with our responsibilities, obligations, etc. and also make our lives a little more comfortable. Being able to setup these events and then receiving notice about actionable items helps to use my phone as a tool instead of just a huge distraction. Happy experimenting!

Push Away

Push notifications have almost completely replaced text messaging and email notifications for me. I used to love text message reminders, but now I get annoyed that I cannot take action on those items. For example, I get a message from twitter, the most I can do is click a link. When I get a push notification from twitter I can read it, then dismiss, or I can touch it, get the full twitter app experience and find out more about that particular tweet, user, hashtags or people mentioned. This gives me a lot of power that a simple text message cannot.

Bank of America recently released an update to their Android app that allows replacing the standard email and text message notifications with push notifications. This is great news since I can change the frequency and/or conditions of the notification without having to load up their site in a full desktop browser. They’ve even introduced their new BankAmeriDeals (or whatever it is called) so that I can receive push notifications with opportunities to save money. This last feature may get obnoxious after a few days, so we’ll see how long I keep it on.

Alarm.com is another example of a company using the full-features of a smartphone to benefit their customers. I have an alarm system that allows me to arm/disarm and change the thermostat in my house while I am away from it. They recently introduced a feature that allows me to set a notification at a certain time at night to remind me to arm my house, this is great as I  often forget to arm the house (which completely defeats the purpose of the system). Another great feature is geofencing, I have the app setup to notify me when I get outside a certain radius from my house, to remind me to arm the house. This even works with 2 phones, you can set the trigger to only notify you if BOTH phones are a certain distance from the house, it won’t bother either if one of us is still home. This is one of the coolest features to me, using my phone’s built-in hardware to help make my life better, easier, safer, etc.

Slice can be setup to scan your email and pick out purchases. This allows the app to notify you when your packages are being shipped, in transit or when they have been delivered. I have been surprised by this app many times when I didn’t hear a delivery truck or see anything in my mailbox. The first time this happened, I had forgotten about ordering anything, I got a push notification that there was a package on my doorstep, I looked at the message with a puzzled look, walked to my door and there WAS a package waiting for me. Awesome!

Another great advantage to push over text messaging is that I am not limited to a single device. I carry 2 phones around one for work (iPhone 4), one personal (T-Mobile G2). As a result I have a lot of application overlap, this is on purpose, since if one phone is dead, or out of service, I can pick up the other and continue my conversation (Facebook/Google+ Messaging). I normally have notifications for personal things (Facebook/Twitter/etc) turned off on my work phone, so that I don’t get a crazy amount of buzzing in my pocket when both phones go off simultaneously, though it is incredibly cool to get notifications in realtime on both devices.

I wish the Mint.com app would implement push notifications, I despise getting their email notifications now that I have tasted the goodness that is push. One disadvantage to push messages/notifications, I can’t go back and search through them, such as with email notifications, granted, I usually delete most notifications anyway, this is a minor issue.

I am glad that application developers and the services world as a whole has noticed the advantage to push notifications. I do wish there was a backup method such as text, for those rare times when I am in an area of poor coverage and limited or no internet. At the same time, it’s okay to be off the grid for a while.

Controllers (ASP.NET MVC)

I had the opportunity to write up a presentation about the Controller part of ASP.NET MVC. With Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 as my guide I whipped up this presentation and some sample code.Feel free to download/read/learn/look at it as you please. 

One of my favorite things about controllers is the ability to return pretty much any type of content that you desire, files, xml, json, whatever. This makes controllers incredibly versatile and allows the developers to give the users power over what they get back (when they want to allow it).


Enjoy.

Mobilificationizing

If you are reading this on a desktop computer, the screen shots are for you. If you have a smartphone or other smaller screened device let me know in the comments how it looks and what does/doesn't work.

I was feeling under the weather recently, and as a result I stayed home from work to sleep longer, take some medicine and get better. After waking up around 10am I realized that there were a few things I was putting off because I didn't have time during the day at work, and most of my free night-time is taken up by a side-project that I've been working on for the last few months (http://studybuddycampus.com) and normal life things.

I took the opportunity to make some changes to my wife's blog about our family. It now has 3 columns and she loves it! Go take a look: http://tommyandalisha.blogspot.com

I finally got around to fixing the obnoxious problem I have when I visit this very site on my phone, the fixed-width sidebar. I know that I haven't been the best at updating and that is partly due to me wanting to play Halo/Call of Duty/etc or just not feeling like I have anything interesting to say. I feel that, as a heavy mobile internet user, I should have a site that looks good on a phone.

My site was slapped together a few years ago using asp.net/c# with master pages. Their was no concern in my mind for a mobile site, luckily master pages are wonderful and all I needed to do was create a duplicate of my existing template and start chopping. First thing I did was move the sidebar on top so that it sits on top of the content it normally flanks. Then I gave each main wrapper a width of 100% so that it would stretch to whatever screen size it was given. I checked it out on my phone and realized that the phone thought the web page was much wider than the phone's screen. I added the following meta tag to prevent this and tell the page to fit the width of the device and not assume a desktop size.

After a few more tweaks to the general layout and adjusting the padding/margins I got the site to look somewhat presentable. I used some fancy jQuery magic to get the sidebar er...menu to show/hide when the arrow in the upper right-hand is touched.

Now all I needed to do was redirect users to the correct master page when visiting my site on a mobile phone. I found the following code online and added it to all pages in need of the mobile layout.



After that was in place I realized that images from my posts were a little bit too wide for the average phone screen. Instead of manually resizing all of my images, I once again turned to jQuery for some help. Using an example I found, I check each image's width, if it is wider than the current width of the body tag, it reduces its size to fit nicely within the confines of the given screen.



All in all the process was fairly painless to convert an existing site, most of the work was getting the formatting correct. In the future I'd like to build a site from the ground up with current mobile browsers in mind, but that's for another sick day...

HTML 5

Just got some cool new HTML5 stickers to show off. Now it's time to add some new features to my site.

This also serves as a test post with the official Blogger for Android app.